1.2 Study Methods of Criminology

The criminologist's toolkit (the methodology's ladder): The statistics' method — the official data (the police-and-court records; the crime-rate's computation: the incidence, the prevalence, the clearance rates) + the victimisation surveys (the dark-figure problem: the unreported-and-unrecorded crime's correction) — the data's honest limits (the reporting's biases, the recording's politics); The case-study method — the individual criminal's depth-study (the biography, the life- history; the clinical method's face) — the richness vs the generalisation's limits; The survey-and-interview method — the self-report studies (the offenders' own accounts; the hidden delinquency's discovery); the questionnaires' reach; The comparative-and-historical method — the cross-cultural crime's study (the definitions' variation); the penality's history (the punishment's evolution — Unit 5.2's craft); The experimental-and-quasi-experimental methods — the prevention-programme evaluations (the control-group designs; the "what works" question); The observational-and-ethnographic methods — the participant observation (the gangs, the subcultures, the prison society — the insider's view); The predictive method — the risk assessment (the recidivism's prediction — the probation- and-parole machinery's science face). The methods' craft: the triangulation (the methods' combination — the single-method's bias corrected); the ethics (the subjects' protection — the criminology's own integrity).